Re: Marketing list action: Market Research for GNOME and GNU/Linux

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 18:11:44 -0700
Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com> wrote:

> I think John's point is how do we find out what people really want.  A
> survey to who we know right now would be:
>
> * slashdot crowd
> * gnome community
> * minor fringe linux users

Hm, I might be wrong but I believe this was not John's intention.
However, if we'd like to know what _Linux_ users want to see in GNOME,
we should consider to differentiate betweeen bugs and feature requests
in Bugzilla.

And for the slashdot crowd, a web based survey would be sufficient,
IMHO. Let's scan older OSNews comments, Slashdot, and bugzilla for
feature requests. There's already a threat in the GNOME forum: "What
GNOME needs in the future". Organizing this, a little bit of additional
brainstorming, and we're basically done. :-)

> We really don't have any real outreach that I can tell.  Now, *maybe*
> we could get a company like Sun who have deployed JDS to customers to
> ask for feedback same with RH, Novell, and Mandrake.  That could be a
> tangible short term approach to market research.
>
> But I still think doing the market research is beneficial to the Free
> Software and those who derive value from it.

Yes, indeed. This is also my opinion. I was just pointing out that a
web-based survey would be sufficient for a start.

> As for the overall goal, thats lacking.  I can write something to
> debate over tonight onto the wiki and people can try to figure out
> what works best then.  Generally most people start out with a mission
> statement; a single unifying sentence that we all rally around and
> keeps us focused.
>
> sri

That would be great step indeed. :-) 

But I must admit that "goal" meant to me something
1.) advanced (or challenging),
2.) specific and measurable, and
3.) binding.

For example, Mozillas "1 Million downloads in 10 days" was such a goal.
OpenOffice.org's "50% selection rate until 2010" is such a goal. "5% of
all desktop installments worldwide within the next 5 years" might become
a good goal for a desktop enviroment. ;-)


Claus